Faculty News: The Chicago Accent

We are happy to announce that Dr. Durian was recently interviewed for a segment on NPR about his work (with Richard Cameron of the University of Illinois, Chicago) on the Chicago Accent. It appeared on NPR's Chicago affiliate, WBEZ 91.5, this past week.

In Dr. Durian's words: "In terms of what we are researching--we are looking at how the way Chicagoans pronounce vowel sounds has changed since the late 1800s. We are using a number of archival recordings that were made by the researcher Lee Pederson in the 1960s, and then we are comparing recordings we have made our selves in recent years with the older recordings. In doing so, we can actually explicitly trace how language change has been happening, since there's a roughly 50 year time period between when our recordings and Pederson's were made.

"In addition, we can look at how vowel pronunciations have changed across generational groups in Chicago. Since all of Pederson's subjects were born between 1875 and 1945, and all of our present day subjects were born between about 1920 and 1990, we can break up all the subjects into generational groups. So we are basically able to look at language change across 5 generations of speakers this way.

"To do the analysis, we use a computer program called PRAAT that lets us analyze digital sound files of all the subjects and take measurements of speaker vowels, called formant measurements. These basically allow us to use Hz measurements to see how people's tongues were aligned in their mouths as they produced the vowel sounds, and then we can compare those measurements across different subjects. Then we can also plot those measurements in graphs, and get an idea of what a subject's entire vowel system looks like, and again, make comparisons across speakers. We make comparisons by subject age and sex, as well as other social factors, like social class or ethnicity.

"I am completing this work as a part of a collaboration with a linguist at University of Illinois at Chicago named Richard Cameron. I grew up in Chicagoland, and had been working there at several schools before I came to Bloomsburg, which is how I got involved in the research. We are still in the process of completing our analysis, but we hope to be done sometime in the next few months."

You can check out the audio for this interview here!